Let’s reframe the question. Historically, “gay” has been a big tent that includes a wide range of non-normative sexual subcultures and expressions of gender, and what we now call transgender has had a place there.

Remember that in 1969, rebellion and resistance by the queens and hair fairies of Christopher Street transformed a police raid at the Stonewall Inn into a defiant act of “gay liberation.” Twenty years later, “queer” politics included transgender as another version of what it called “antiheteronormativity.” The ’90s version of “queer” morphed into the L.G.B.T. community of recent years — an abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender — and for transfolk, it was politically invaluable to be part of that coalition. It still is.

Transfolk were not always welcome in the L.G.B.T. movement. But gays and lesbians are certainly welcome in ours.

All along, however, many non-trans gays and lesbians considered transgender issues to be more marginal, more deviant, less respectable and less important. Some find us threatening to their own sense of self, express open hostility, and disparage us as weird, sick or misguided. The “T.” has thus had a fraught relationship with “L.G.B.,” never more so than in 2007, when a gay congressman, Barney Frank, stripped protections for transgender people from the proposed federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act. That was a divisive, short-sighted move that put Frank on the wrong side of history. After that slap, I and many others concentrated primarily on trans-specific issues, while welcoming any and all allies.

The trans movement has taken huge strides since then by putting its own particular concerns in the foreground. For example: influencing the removal of "gender identity disorder" from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association; overturning laws that require sterilization as the price of government recognition of gender change; and securing passage of protective legislation, like Argentina's recent law establishing gender self-determination without requiring medical intervention.

Things have taken an interesting turn since the repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and since the Supreme Court’s decision on the Defense of Marriage Act. To many gays and lesbians, transgender rights now seems to be the next big fight for equality, and these allies are jumping on our bandwagon. As long as we who actually live transgender lives determine the course of our own struggle, I applaud support from others in our movement.